Special report: The Arctic
.The melting north.The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, says James Astill. The retreating ice offers access to precious minerals and new sea lanes—but also carries grave dangers.Jun 16th 2012

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STANDING ON THE Greenland ice cap, it is obvious why restless modern man so reveres wild places.Everywhere you look, ice draws the eye, squeezed and chiselled by a unique coincidence of forces. Gormenghastian ice ridges, silver and lapis blue, ice mounds and other frozen contortions are minutely observable in the clear Arctic air. The great glaciers impose order on the icy sprawl, flowing down to a semi-frozen sea.

The ice cap is still, frozen in perturbation.There is not a breath of wind, no engine’s sound, no bird’s cry, no hubbub at all. Instead of noise, there is its absence. You feel it as a pressure behind the temples and, if you listen hard, as a phantom roar. For generations of frosty-whiskered European explorers, and still today, the ice sheet is synonymous with the power of nature.

The Arctic is one of the world’s least explored and last wild places.Even the names of its seas and rivers are unfamiliar, though many are vast. Siberia’s Yenisey and Lena each carries more water to the sea than the Mississippi or the Nile. Greenland, the world’s biggest island, is six times the size of Germany. Yet it has a population of just 57,000, mostlyInuit scattered in tiny coastal settlements. In the whole of the Arctic—roughly defined as the Arctic Circle and a narrow margin to the south (see map)—there are barely 4mpeople, around half of whom live in a few cheerless post-Soviet cities such as Murmansk and Magadan. In most of the rest, including much of Siberia, northern Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland and northern Scandinavia, there is hardly anyone. Yet the region is anything but inviolate..

Fast forward

.A heat map of the world, colour-coded for temperature change, shows the Arctic in sizzling maroon. Since 1951 it has warmed roughlytwiceas much as the global average. In that period the temperature in Greenland has goneup by 1.5°C, compared with around0.7°Cglobally. This disparity is expected to continue. A 2°Cincrease in global temperatures—which appears inevitable as greenhouse-gas emissions soar—would mean Arctic warming of 3-6°C.

Almost all Arctic glaciers have receded.The area of Arctic landcovered by snow in early summer has shrunk by almost a fifthsince 1966. But it is the Arctic Ocean that is most changed. In the 1970s, 80s and 90s the minimum extent of polar pack ice fell by around8%per decade. Then, in 2007, the sea ice crashed, melting to a summer minimum of 4.3m sq km (1.7m square miles), close to half the average for the 1960s and 24%below the previous minimum, set in 2005. This left the north-west passage, a sea lane through Canada’s36,000-island Arctic Archipelago, ice-free for the first time in memory.

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Scientists, scrambling to explain this, found that in 2007every natural variation, including warm weather, clear skies and warm currents, had lined up to reinforce the seasonal melt.But last year there was no such remarkable coincidence: it was as normal as the Arctic gets these days. And the sea ice still shrank to almost the same extent.

There is no serious doubt about the basic cause of the warming.It is, in the Arctic as everywhere, the result of an increase in heat-trapping atmospheric gases, mainly carbon dioxide released when fossil fuels are burned. Because the atmosphere is shedding lesssolar heat, it is warming—a physical effect predicted back in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist. But why is the Arctic warming faster than other places?

Consider, first, how very sensitive to temperature change the Arctic is because of where it is.In both hemispheres the climate system shifts heat from the steamy equator to the frozen pole. But in the north the exchange is much more efficient. This is partly because of the lofty mountain ranges of Europe, Asia and America that help mix warm and cold fronts, much as boulders churn water in a stream. Antarctica, surrounded by the vast southern seas, is subject to much less atmospheric mixing.

.The land masses that encircle the Arctic also prevent the polar oceans revolving around it as they do around Antarctica.Instead they surge, north-south, between the Arctic land masses in a gigantic exchange of cold and warm water: the Pacific pours through the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, and the Atlantic through the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago.

That keeps the average annual temperature for the high Arctic (the northernmost fringes of land and the sea beyond) at a relatively sultry-15°C; much of the rest is close to melting-point for much of the year. Even modest warming can therefore have a dramatic effect on the region’s ecosystems. The Antarctic is also warming, but with an average annual temperature of -57°C it will take more than a few hot summers for this to become obvious.

.The albedo effect

.The efficient north-south mixing of air may also play a part in the Arctic’s amplified warming.The winds that rush northwards carry pollutants, including soot from European and Asian smokestacks, which has a powerful warming effect over snow. In recent decades there has also been a rise in levels of mercury, a by-product of burning coal, in the tissues of beluga whales, walruses and polar bears, all of which the Inuit eat. This is another reason why the Arctic is not virgin.

.But the main reason for Arctic amplification is the warming effect of replacing light-coloured snow and ice with darker-colouredland or water.Because dark surfaces absorb more heat than light ones, this causes local warming, which melts more snow and ice, revealing more dark land or water, and so on. Known as the albedo effect, this turns out to be a more powerful positive feedback than most researchers had expected. Most climate models predicted that the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by the end of thiscentury; an analysis published in 2009 in Geophysical Research Letters suggested it might happen as early as 2037. Some now think it will be sooner.

.It is hard to exaggerate how dramatic this is.Perhaps not since the felling of America’s vast forests in the 19th century, or possibly since the razing of China’s and western Europe’s great forests a thousand years before that, has the world seen such a spectacular environmental change. The consequences for Arctic ecosystems will be swingeing.

.As their ancient ice buffers vanish, Arctic coastlines are eroding; parts of Alaska are receding at 14 metres (45 feet) a year.Niche habitats, such as meltwater pools on multi-year ice, are dwindling. Some highly specialised Arctic species will probably become extinct as their habitats shrink and southern interlopers rush in. Others will thrive. The early signs of this biological reshuffle are already evident. High-Arctic species, including the polar bear, are struggling. Species new to the region, such as mackerel and Atlantic cod, are coming up in Arctic trawler nets. Yet the shock waves of Arctic change will be felt much more widely.

.Melting sea ice will not affect global sea levels, because floating ice displaces its own mass in seawater.But melting glacierswill, and the Arctic’s are shedding ice at a great rate. Greenland’s ice cap is losing an estimated200 gigatonnes of ice a year, enough to supply a billion people with water. The Arctic’s smaller ice caps and glaciers together are losing a similar amount. Before this became clear, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had predicted a sea-level rise of up to 59cm during this century. Given what is happening up north, many now think this too modest.

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A wilder fear is that a deluge of Arctic meltwater could disrupt the mighty “overturning circulation” of the global oceans, the exchange of warm tropical and cold polar water. It has happened before, at leastseven times in the past60,000 years, and needs watching. But recent evidence suggests that such a calamity is not imminent.

.Another concern, that thawing Arctic permafrost could release vast quantities of carbon dioxide and methane, looms larger. That, too, has happened before, around 55m yearsago, leading to a global temperature increase of 5°C in a fewthousand years.

.Such risks are hard to pin down, and possibly small. Many elements of the change in the Arctic, including the rates of snow melt and glacier retreat, are still within the range of historical variations. Yet the fact that the change is man-made is unprecedented, which introduces huge uncertainty about how far and fast it will proceed. For those minded to ignore the risks, it is worth noting that even the more extreme predictions of Arctic warming have been outpaced by what has happened in reality.

Riches of the north

.In the long run the unfrozen north could cause devastation. But, paradoxically, in the meantime no Arctic species will profit from it as much as the one causing it: humans. Disappearing sea ice may spell the end of the last Eskimo cultures, but hardly anyone lives in an igloo these days anyway. And the great melt is going to make a lot of people rich.

.As the frozen tundra retreatsnorthwards, large areas of the Arctic will become suitable for agriculture. An increasingly earlyArctic spring could increase plant growth by up to 25%. That would allow Greenlanders to grow more than the paltry100 tonnes of potatoes they manage now. And much more valuable materials will become increasingly accessible. The Arctic is already a big source of minerals, including zinc in Alaska, gold in Canada, iron in Sweden and nickel in Russia, and there is plenty more to mine.

The Arctic also has oil and gas, probably lots.Exploration licences are now being issued across the region, in the United States, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia. On April 18th ExxonMobil finalised the terms of a deal with Russia’s Rosneft to invest up to $500 billion in developing offshore reserves, including in Russia’s Arctic Karasea. Oil companies do not like to talk about it, but this points to another positive feedback from the melt. Climate change caused by burning fossil fuels will allow more Arctic hydrocarbons to be extracted and burned.

.These new Arctic industries will not emerge overnight.There is still plenty of sea ice to make the north exceptionally tough and expensive to work in; 24-hour-a-daywinter darkness and Arctic cyclones make it tougher still.

.Most of the current exploration is unlikely to lead to hydrocarbon production for a decadeat least. But in time it will happen. The prize is huge, and oil companies and Arctic governments are determined to claim it. Shortly before the ExxonMobil-Rosneft deal was announced, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, announcedplans to make it much more attractive for foreigners to invest in Russian offshore energy production. “Offshore fields, especially in the Arctic, are without any exaggeration our strategic reserve for the 21st century,” he said.

.For half the 20th century the Arctic, as the shortest route between Russia and America, was the likeliest theatre for a nuclear war, and some see potential for fresh conflict in its opening. Russia and Canada, the twobiggest Arctic countries by area, have encouraged this fear: the Arctic stirs fiercenationalist sentiment in both.

.With a new regard to their northern areas, some of the eightArctic countries are, in a modest way, remilitarising them. Norwayshifted its military commandcentre to the Arctic town of Reitan in 2009. Russia is replacing and upgrading its sixnuclear icebreakers, a piece of civilian infrastructure with implications for security too. Yet this special report will suggest that warnings about Arctic conflict are, like the climate, overcooked.

.The Arctic is no terra nullius.Unlike Antarctica, which is governed by an international treaty, most of it is demarcated. Of half a dozenterritorial disputes in the region, the biggest is probably between the United States and Canada, over the status of the north-west passage. Those twocountries will not go to war. And the majority of Arctic countries are members of NATO.

.Yet the melting Arctic will have geostrategic consequences beyond helping a bunch of resource-fattened countries to get fatter.An obvious one is the potentially disruptive effect of new trade routes. Sailing along the coast of Siberia by the north-east passage, or Northern Sea Route (NSR), as Russians and mariners call it, cuts the distance between western Europe and east Asia by roughly a third. The passage is now open for four or five months a year and is getting more traffic. In 2010 only fourships used the NSR; last year34did, in both directions, including tankers, refrigerated vessels carrying fish and even a cruise liner.

..Asia’s big exporters, China, Japan and South Korea, are already investing in ice-capable vessels, or planning to do so.For Russia, which has big plans to develop the sea lane with trans-shipment hubs and other infrastructure, this is a double boon. It will help it get Arctic resources to market faster and also, as the NSR becomes increasingly viable, diversify its hydrocarbon-addicted economy.

..There are risks in this, of dispute if not war, which will require management.What is good for Russia may be bad for Egypt, which last year earned over $5 billion in revenues from the Suez Canal, an alternative east-west shipping route. So it is good that the regional club, the Arctic Council, is showing promise. Under Scandinavian direction for the pasthalf-decade, it has elicited an impressive amount of Arctic co-operation, including on scientificresearch, mapping and resource development..

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Yet how to reconcile the environmental risks of the melting Arctic with the economic opportunities it will present?The shrinkage of the sea ice is no less a result of human hands than the ploughing of the prairies. It might even turn out as lucrative. But the costs will also be huge. Unique ecosystems, and perhaps many species, will be lost in a tide of environmental change. The cause is global pollution, and the risks it carries are likewise global. The Arctic, no longer distant or inviolable, has emerged, almost overnight, as a powerful symbol of the age of man.

Less is more: a Moreau le Jeune illustration of the medieval empire of Charlemagne, focused on France, Germany, the Benelux countries and northern Italy, which some see as a model for a slimmed-down Europe

“Let Europe be whole and free.”

George Bush senior, the former US president, made the above remark in the German city of Mainz in May1989 as the cold war melted away, permitting democracy and national sovereignty to replace Soviet-imposed communism in central and eastern Europe.Twenty-three yearslater, as Spain becomes the fourth eurozone economy in two years to request an international financialrescue, the dream of a united Europe exists, much dimmed, next to a nightmare scarcely conceivable in 1989: a continent torn asunder by an ever expandingsovereign debt and banking crisis.

To a certain extent, Mr Bush’s vision of a community of free European nations came true around the turn of the millennium. East merged with west under the twin umbrellas of the EU and Nato. The union’s 27states – 28 next year with Croatia’s admission – boast pluralistic political systems and, for the majority of citizens, adequately protected civil liberties. However, the financial crisis is testing as never before the resilience of Europe’s welfarestate-based democracies and the durability of the post-1945 integration process.

If Europe’s leaders were to fail to pass this test, the potentialrepercussions for the world, and for Europe’s place in it, would gobeyond even the grim forebodings in business and financial circles of devastated banking systems and international economic disorder.“The immediate consequence of the eurozone crisis is the degradation of the reputation of the European Union as a whole on twocounts: as a model of competent economic policy management and as a model of enlightened regional integration,” says Michael Emerson of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies think-tank.

Despite the emergence of regional trade and economic blocs in Africa, the Americas and Asia, no region in the world has attempted to pool national sovereignties in as ambitious a fashion as the EU has done.No region identifies itself so closely with the ideals of a rules-based international order and an emphasis on trade, aid and “soft power” as opposed to military force. The collapse of its grand experiment – a form of peaceful co-operation that limits the powers of nation-states but does not extinguish national identities – would serve as a cautionary tale for political leaders in other continents.

The launch of the euro in 1999 was a self-conscious effort to accelerate Europe’s unification and extend its influence.In the present crisis the danger is that doing too little, too late will fracture the eurozone, undermine the single European market, push the EU to the international margins and, 55 yearsafter the founding Treaty of Rome, leave the project of European integration in ruins.

The EU’s fragmentation would undermine the aspirations of policy makers who promised the bloc would emerge as a coherent political entity that could stake its claim to economic and diplomatic influence in its dealings with individual powers such as the US, China, India and Russia.

Financially hard-pressed voters, aggrieved at job losses, the erosion of the welfare state and rising levels of non-European immigration, heed the siren calls of anti-establishment politicalparties fired by economic populism and xenophobia. Mainstream politicians, seeking to shore up their support, borrow the intemperate language of their upstart opponents.

In most states, the general publiccontinues to imagine politics in national rather than pan-European terms. The democratic distance between EU institutions and voters has never been greater. The crisisthreatens to unstitch the fabric of integration by focusing the frustrations of northern and western voters – Dutch, French and Germans – on poorer southern and eastern neighbours – Greeks, Poles and Romanians.

In economic terms certain countries control their destinies even less securely than they didduring Mr Bush’s 1989-93 presidency.Greece, Ireland and Portugallabour under strict foreign supervision, exacted as the price for multibillion-euro financial rescues.Spain and Italypursue austerity programmes, drawnup partly under external pressure, that crush economic growth and drive up unemployment but do little to ease punitive borrowingcosts on financial markets.

In its first decade of life, an era marked by a glut of cheap credit on world capital markets, the euro contributed to continental integration by encouraging cross-border investment flows among the single currency’s member states, now numbering17. But fear of a eurozone break-up is renationalising markets as investors withdraw funds from “partner” countries and park them at home. Large-scale purchases of Italian and Spanish governmentbonds by Italian and Spanish financial institutions have created an alarmingly close connection between sovereigns and banks that must be broken to dispel the risk that both are destroying the other.

Some European leaders toy with the thought that it might be easier to stabilise the eurozone if Greece – viewed in certain capitals as an incorrigible example of corruption, profligacy and political infantilism – were to leave. Apart from the danger that uncontrollable financial contagion would spread to other countries, such a step would risk profoundpolitical consequences. It would be the first time since 1945 that a country had joined and then abandoned the European integrationprocess – and not just any country, but one idealised as the fons et origo of European civilisation.

.After that, it would be impossible to present integration as an irreversible project involving all of Europe.In truth, a slimmed-down ideal of unification was already in the minds of EU leaders when they agreed the 2009 Lisbontreaty, which for the first timeestablished the possibility that a country could withdraw from the bloc. Many UK politicians, overwhelmingly English, would like to do just that.

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Doubts also exist about how far western European politicians conceive of integration as a scheme embracing all the EU’s ex-communist states.They bemoan Hungary’s drift from the EU’s democratic standards and condemn corruption and organised crime in Bulgaria and Romania. They havewon wider powers to reinstate frontier controls in Europe’s Schengen border-free travel regime, a cornerstone of integration.

For some in EU founder member states, the ideal of unity is not the Roman empire, which included London and Constantinople within its boundaries, but Charlemagne’s medieval empire, consisting essentially of France, the Benelux countries, Germany and northern Italy.

Yet even a smaller Europe would have to grapple, as the EU does today, with low long-term economic growth rates, excessive debt, demographic stagnation, overburdened pension systems and competition from rising non-European powers. The question of national security and military expenditure arises, too. With the US focusing its efforts increasingly on the Asia-Pacific, European governments will need to step up defence contributions at a time of unrelenting pressure on public finances and popular resistance to welfare cutbacks. That will be hard.

Nemat Shafik, the International Monetary Fund’s deputy managing director, said last month that “increased social and political tensions are threatening to undermine public support for the very reforms that are meant to put the economies back on track”. Yet precisely because the economic overhaul of Europe is a long-term task, such tensions will persist.It may prove hard for the mass political parties that have governed Europe since 1945 – social democratic, centrist and centre-right – to maintain control in the face of radical, unconventional challengers that are attracting support from Austria and Finland to the Netherlands and Italy.

All is not lost, insist EU policy makers. The bloc remains one of the globe’s most affluent regions and a formidable actor in the enforcement of world trade rules and business regulation. Its insistence on including non-European airlines in its plan for limiting carbon emissions drew the double-edged commentlast month from Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s EU ambassador, that “some peoplecompare the EU with a crocodile. Not because of its teeth, but because of its inability to move backwards”.

Initiatives under consideration include enhanced pan-European banking supervision, a common deposit insurance scheme and a joint bank resolution fund for the restructuring or closure of failing financial institutions.Furthermore, political support for the introduction of jointly guaranteed eurozone bonds has broadened since the election on May 6 of François Hollande as France’s president. If agreed, such steps would complement the new German-inspired rules that commit the eurozone to seemingly perpetual fiscal rigour.

But fiscal union is a medium-term goal and the path towards it is tough.Few large EU countries are in the mood to increase the bloc’s annual budget – about €129bn this year, or 1 per cent of annual EU economic output. Eurozone bonds, a banking union and tougher disciplinary powers for the overlords in Brussels clash with the need for a fiscal union to have democratic legitimacy – and with the defence of national wealth, pride and sovereignty in each member state.

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German politicians, bankers and voters view southern European countries as desperate to piggyback on Berlin’s solid financial credentials and lacking in the stamina and moral fibrerequired to accept disagreeable economic reforms.France is suspected in Berlin of being unwilling to sacrifice national autonomy to the extent necessary to make a reality of European political union.

Other countries, by contrast, resent Germany’s monotonous homilies.They complain Germanylacks European solidarity and even acts against its own interests, given the benefits of the euro for German business.

These frictions surfaced after the election victory of Mr Hollande, a Socialist who promised voters economic growth and social protection as opposed to German-style thrift. Volker Kauder, parliamentary leader of the Christian Democratic party of Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, admonished: “Germany is not here to finance French election promises.” Retorted Benoît Hamon, Mr Hollande’s spokesman: “We didn’t have an election to get a European president called Frau Merkel who has the power to decide everyone else’s fate.”

Franco-German differences are nothing new in EU history. It is possible the twonations will again find a way to keep alivesome version of European unity.

.But if they do, it will be a political federation or fiscal union limited in scope. Nor willall27 existing EU member statesbe part of it. If Europe’s luckholds, it will in the future be free. But it will be something less than whole. .

.The push for political union

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.If closer economic union holds the key to overcoming the eurozone crisis, many policy makers argue that a political union to close Europe’s “democratic deficit” will also be required.

.With monetary policy controlled by the European Central Bank, and budgetary supervision increasingly in the hands of unelected authorities in Brussels, influence over economic policy making has drifted away from national legislatures and voters.

The steady transfer of powers to the European parliament has failed to compensate: the legislaturelacks the full range of powers found in traditional parliaments and its remoteness from citizens is reflected in turnouts that have fallen at every vote since direct elections to the assembly began in 1979.

The Germans contend that stronger democratic controls should promote closer union.They are not proposing a a European superstate. Instead, a set of proposals endorsed last November by a congress of the ruling Christian Democratic Union shows how the country’s leaders imagine a future political union.

The CDU wants the president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, to be directly elected by all the bloc’s citizens.It wants a bicameral legislature in which the European parliament would sit as a directly elected people’s chamber; the Council of Ministers, which groups EU government representatives, would sit as a kind of upper house.

The Germans also seek a radical departure in proposing that bothchambers could initiate legislation, while parliament currently just shapes and approves it.Another CDU idea is to change the parliament’s representation so that countries with larger populations, such as Germany itself, obtain more seats.

The crisis of legitimacy is prompting some old Brussels hands to argue that the 17eurozone countries should set up their own legislative arrangements as part of an avant garde push for closer integration.

But such a breakaway move might undermine the integrity of the single European market and, ultimately, the EU itself.

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.